Reflections on Organizing with Homeless People in Hungary Bálint Misetics

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Reflections on Organizing with Homeless People in Hungary Bálint Misetics Interface: a journal for and about social movements Article Volume 9 (1): 389 – 423 (2017) Misetics, Homelessness, citizenship and need Homelessness, citizenship and need interpretation: reflections on organizing with homeless people in Hungary Bálint Misetics Abstract Hungarian grassroots activist group The City is for All is the joint effort of members directly affected by homelessness or housing poverty and their allies (activists with secure housing), who work together for the right to housing. The following paper provides reflections on the group’s work and politics by one if its founding members. It is introduced with a summary of the social context in which the group operates (the emergence of mass homelessness after the transition and its management by the state), which is followed by a detailed account of the group’s internal organization and main activities. The next section examines the dynamics of inter-class cooperation within the group. The final section offers tentative theoretical interpretations on the politics of the group. The paper does not seek to address a specific research question, its goal instead is to provide an insider—but at the same-time self- reflective, and to a certain extent, theoretically inspired—view on the group in a way that can be useful for other organizers and politically engaged social scientists who are interested in building inter-class alliances in social justice activism. Keywords: homelessness, housing poverty, evictions, activism, Hungary, inter-class cooperation, organic public sociology, linguistic domination, politics of need interpretation 1. The social context: homelessness in Hungary 1.1. The emergence and reproduction of mass homelessness Homelessness was not officially addressed by social policy before the regime change of 1989/1990, though the term “homeless” was used regularly in lower lever administrative documents, and the hidden practices of social care (coupled with criminalization) did provide shelter for homeless people in state-run workers’ hostels and social care homes (Horváth 2008). Mass homelessness emerged in Hungary in the years of the transition from “socialism” to free market capitalism, with deindustrialization and the corresponding sharp rise in joblessness, the quick decline in the number of beds in workers’ hostels and in the prevalence of subletting of rooms and beds (both of which provided minimal housing options for those in dire need), the decriminalization of unemployment 389 Interface: a journal for and about social movements Article Volume 9 (1): 389 – 423 (2017) Misetics, Homelessness, citizenship and need and alcoholism (and a partial amnesty), and the loss of thousands of beds in mental health institutions.1 The main structural reason behind the emergence as well as the permanence of mass homelessness was the gap that arose between incomes and the cost of housing. Housing, to a significant degree, was a state controlled good before 1990; and while the allocation of housing subsidies was an important example of how the regime’s social policy reproduced—and even increased—social inequalities (Szelényi 1983; Manchin and Szelényi 1987), housing affordability was managed through a system in which the bureaucratically set wages did not cover the costs of housing, but the prices of rent and utilities were kept low through extensive consumer subsidies (Hegedüs and Tosics 1996). The transition brought along the re-commodification of labor as well as of housing: however, while in the case of housing, this meant the disintegration of the previous housing model, including a sharp decline of subsidies and a sharp increase in household energy prices (a fourfold increase in the early 1990s and an altogether twelvefold increase in the decade); the re-commodification of labour meant a massive increase in joblessness and decreasing real wages and incomes. State withdrawal from the field of housing took place at the very time when—because of the “social costs of the transition”—the need for it would had been even more than before. Furthermore, the rapid mass privatization of the municipal housing stock in a generous “right to buy” fashion not only redistributed an immense wealth to those already privileged by the earlier system of housing policy, and increased inequalities in its own right by distributing higher than average “privatization gifts” to those with higher education, income and wealth (Dániel 1995). It also severely limited the subsequent possibilities of public housing provision. The share of municipal public housing shrank from 22 percent to 3 percent of the total housing stock: what remained is usually housing in the worst condition with the poorest residents (who, without savings, could not afford to buy their home even at the offered low prices). As it has long been argued by Titmuss (1968), services offered solely to the poor will soon become poor services: the renewal of the municipal housing stock is minimal, the housing units are often in unacceptable condition, and local authorities often try to reduce their maintenance costs by getting rid of their poorer tenants (often within the framework of urban renewal programs) or by further privatization (Ladányi 2000; Czirfusz and Pósfai 2015). Furthermore, the remaining 113 thousand public housing units are only partially allocated on the basis of social criteria, and even those are sometimes defined in a way to exclude those most in need. While evictions from public housing (the number of which has been sharply increasing) is a significant source of homelessness, homeless people—with 1 On the emergence of mass homelessness, see (in Hungarian): Győri 1990; Iványi 1994; Oross 1996; Mezei 1999; Győri 2008; Misetics 2016. 390 Interface: a journal for and about social movements Article Volume 9 (1): 389 – 423 (2017) Misetics, Homelessness, citizenship and need sporadic exceptions through “Housing first” projects specifically targeted to them—have virtually no chance to access public housing (Fehér, Somogyi and Teller 2012). While the lack of a considerable public housing stock could have been substituted for by an adequate system of demand-side rental subsidies or housing allowances, nothing in this vein has evolved in Hungary (Hegedüs and Teller 2004). Regulation on private renting and rent setting can be characterized as markedly liberal (Lux and Puzanov 2012), and even that regulation is commonly disregarded, with the consequent insecurity of private renting (Hegedüs, Horváth and Teller 2014). Since 1990, low-income households who could not own a property have been mostly left alone to struggle with increasingly adverse market conditions, and the state failed to adequately address the systemic causes of indebtedness and homelessness as well. This was not only a failure to act, but also a flawed design of housing policies which have been operating: indeed, a predominant cause of prevailing housing poverty as well as of the reproduction of homelessness has been the extremely unjust distribution of state support for housing. In the 1990s as well as in the early 2000s and currently, housing-related state expenditures have been showing an extreme bias in favor of the middle- and upper-classes, and against the lower classes and the poor (see Dániel 1997; Hegedüs 2013; Misetics 2017). 1.2. State response to homelessness Two and a half decades ago, in the winter of 1989-1990, protests, sit-ins and the well-publicized occupation of major train-stations by homeless people all made it obvious to the Hungarian public that there is a crisis. Homelessness emerged as a public issue in the peculiar historical moment in which the “socialist” regime was already in the business of undoing itself, but the perception of social problems and of the corresponding state responsibilities was still much under the influence of the social sensibilities and political understandings cultivated by the previous “welfare dictatorship” (Bartha 2012). As one of the intellectual allies of the homeless protesters put it in his recollections: “The final goal could not have been anything else than the state treating the homeless so that you are a citizen of this country, and your status of citizenship makes you entitled to live and to be housed” (quoted in Iványi 1997, 17). The homeless protesters, with banners such as “We are human too”, indeed demanded jobs and housing. While homeless protesters did not succeed on the housing front, an elaborate system of state-sponsored shelters, drop-in centers and outreach social work programs did evolve, partially because of the disruption and publicity they achieved for the cause. Large, dormitory-style shelters opened in abandoned buildings, unused basements, recently closed worker's hostels, military barracks, in the wooden shacks of the campsite of the disbanded Communist Youth League and even inside a huge vessel originally built for war reparation to 391 Interface: a journal for and about social movements Article Volume 9 (1): 389 – 423 (2017) Misetics, Homelessness, citizenship and need the Soviet Union. These responses, which laid down the basis of the contemporary homeless assistance system, resembled, and often still resemble emergency relief in case of unexpected (natural) disasters, rather than social policy. Still, in comparison to 1989, when even in Budapest there was only 16 male and 8 female shelter beds available specifically for homeless people, and one single temporary home for families, today just in the capital there are around 5 thousand people living in overnight shelters and temporary hostels, and the capacity of the homeless-assistance system is more than twice as much country-wide. The provision of shelters, temporary hostels and day-time centers for homeless people became a legal obligation of larger local authorities, and there is also an extensive system of state-funded network of street social work services. Besides the emergence of this homeless assistance system, the 1990s were characterized by informal police harassment of fluctuating intensity without any attempt to legalize the practice (Udvarhelyi 2014). Things changed fundamentally after the new government took office in 2010, however.
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